A mistake
by cedricsowner
Summary: A murder attempt on the life of David Rossi sends the team to San Francisco. This is my first venture into fan fiction ever.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I do not own Criminal Minds and intend no copyright infringement.

A mistake

_Aristotle distinguished between three sorts of harmful deeds: Without intention, with evil intention and with intention but without ill will. He called the first sort accidents, the second crimes and the last ones mistakes. _

Talk about Monday mornings being the worst part of the week… The bullet had missed Rossi by inches. If he hadn't turned in just the right second to gaze after a beautiful woman, it would have left a hole in his forehead. Instead the teflon-coated little thing had gone through a pillar, a window, a shelf and the gas station's cash register before getting stuck in a brick wall. Whoever had aimed at him hadn't been out to play.

"Was it random or did someone target you intentionally?" Hotchner was very worried. "Do we have a new Beltway sniper incident or was this personal?" He didn't like either option.

"I'd say it was personal", Rossi mused, taking in the bullet's trajectory. "The ammunition points to a pro." The shot had come from a parked car. He had heard a vehicle rushing off right after the gun's report. They were still trying to find a witness who could describe it in detail.

"What would be more likely? The beginning of a series of sniper attacks with a BAU agent as a perchance first victim or a murder attempt upon the life of a man widely known for finding more psychotic offenders than all of us combined?" Reid's questions encapsulated what they all thought.

"If you hear hoof beats, look for horses, not zebras", Morgan agreed.

"Did anyone threaten you? Did you notice anything unusual lately?", Hotchner inquired.

"Unusual?" Rossi's thoughts went back to the weekend. "I almost shot someone."

He told them that on Friday evening a man had approached him at his front door. He had been so quiet that Rossi had felt thoroughly threatened.

"All I saw was a figure suddenly stepping out of the dark. I drew my gun, told him to freeze, patted him down. He was totally shocked. Practically soiled his pants. He said he just wanted to talk to me. His sister had been murdered two weeks ago in San Francisco and he wanted me to look into the case. People sometimes ask me things like that, it's because of my books, I guess. I've got no idea where he got my address. I told him I don't do single homicides. He went away."

"Strange story. Did he tell you his name?"

Rossi fished a business card out of his pocket and handed it to Morgan.

"Henry Milton. Financial consultant. Hm. I'll have Garcia run over it." He activated his cell phone. "Hello sweetheart…"

Ten minutes later Garcia called back and informed them that Henry Milton was in a San Francisco hospital, lying in deep coma after somebody had shot him on Saturday afternoon with a teflon-coated bullet.

"Let's take the jet and head to San Francisco", Hotchner decided. "Whatever this is, it started down there."


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: I do not own Criminal Minds and intend no copyright infringement.

"The police think Emma Milton discovered a burglar in her apartment who killed her in order to escape. Her notebook is missing", Rossi recounted.

He, Hotchner and Morgan were taking a look at the deceased's apartment. It was a nice, comfortably untidy flat with an old-fashioned fireplace, a wooden rocking-chair right in front of it and lots of books. The mantelpiece was adorned with a huge photo of the victim and her brother, taken on a sunny beach.

"They look quite close", Hotchner observed.

"Milton was completely shattered over the death of his sister. Early orphaned, they had only had each other. In addition to that he had been very busy in the last few months of Emma's life. She had wanted to meet him a couple of times, but he had had no time. So his loss is even more aggravated by a profound feeling of guilt because he neglected her. When I met him he was fiercely determined to find her murderer and convinced that there was more to the case than a simple break-in gone wrong. He said he couldn't believe that a burglar would carry around teflon-coated ammunition."

"Milton could have been right about that after all, considering that he ended up with the same kind of bullet in his chest." Morgan took a closer look at the books scattered around in the living-room. "She was a fan of yours."

Rossi nodded. "That's why Milton came to me. About a months before she died Emma suddenly started reading books about serial killers and profiling. She even planned to come to a guest lecture of mine at Berkeley. According to her brother, that was totally out of character for her. She loved literature – Hemingway, Haley, Morrison, Bellow…"

"Not on the reading list of the usual profiling amateur…", Hotchner nodded, leafing through a book he had retrieved from a small coffee table next to the rocking-chair, "…and take a look at what she read in particular – these pages are dog-eared and several passages are underlined."

Rossi furrowed his brow. "All these passages are about serial-killing caregivers. Mostly nurses at hospitals and retirement homes, so-called "Angels of Death". They kill for numerous, often combined reasons: Overwork, personal gain, pity and – probably most important – the feeling of power they get from deciding who may live and who shall die."

"Reid, check out if Emma Milton had any connection to a retirement home or a hospital", Hotchner told Reid by phone. The young man and Prentiss were at the victim's workplace, a small library in Potrero district.

A couple of minutes later Reid returned the call and informed his colleagues that Emma Milton had been in contact with a young woman named Francine Whittaker. She had been a regular at the library before getting injured in a terrible car accident. Emma had visited her for several weeks at St. Francis Memorial Hospital. Then the young woman had suddenly died. "Her colleagues say Emma was devastated", Reid added. "She kept repeating that Whittaker had already been on the mend when she had last seen her."

"Maybe her devastation led to her to ask a couple of questions…", Morgan said. "Maybe she stepped on somebody's toes…"

"Let's go to St. Francis and ask some questions ourselves…", Hotchner decided. "With a little luck we'll find someone with trodden feet."


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: I do not own Criminal Minds and intend no copyright infringement.

What they actually found was a crime scene. One of St. Francis' surgeons had been shot dead in the parking lot a couple of hours ago.

"What in the world is the FBI doing here?", the officer in charge, a balding, rather corpulent man asked crossly. Obviously he was very unhappy about the fact that the Feds were poaching in what he considered to be his woods.

Hotchner introduced him and his people (Reid and Prentiss had arrived meanwhile, too) as unobtrusively as possible and explained that they were investigating a case which was possibly connected with the recent murder. "If you could just tell us what kind of bullet was used…"

At the same moment, a sergeant yelled to the officer in charge: "Sir, it's one of these damn teflon-coated things again!" The officer suddenly looked sick.

"Again?", Hotchner repeated.

"We've had two other murders committed with teflon-coated ammunition since Saturday evening. The bodies keep piling up and…" He bit his tongue just in time before confessing that he had no idea what they were dealing with.

"There's a man in coma at Mt. Zion Hospital – he was shot with teflon-coated ammunition, too. And his sister was murdered with a bullet of the same kind, two weeks ago", Hotchner informed him.

"Why in the world do I have to be told such valuable information by federal agents?!", the stout officer exploded. "Unbelievable! Why didn't my people draw that connection?"

"I'm sure they would have with a little more time on their hands. Besides that the linkage isn't easy to detect: The sister's death was categorized as a burglary gone wrong and the brother is still alive." Hotchner did his best to mollify the man. He definitely didn't need any rivalry, fueled by embarrassment, with the local police. "Would you mind if we take a look at your case files?", he asked politely.

"No, not at all!", the officer gnarled, stomping off, apparently trying to find someone to blame for the humiliation he had, from his point of view, just suffered.

As it turned out, besides the surgeon, a nurse and a mortician had been killed – all with ties to St. Francis Memorial Hospital.

"This doesn't make sense", Rossi murmured.

"The Lainz Angels of Death - Maria Gruber, Irene Leidolf, Stephanija Meyer and Waltraud Wagner – nurses at the Lainz General Hospital in Vienna, admitted to murdering 49 patients, but they were all nurses. A surgeon, a nurse and a mortician are a very strange assembly of Death Angels", Reid said. He enunciated exactly what Rossi was thinking, thus giving the older agent an excellent foundation from where he could work on.

"Maybe she was wrong…", the elderly man mused.

"Who?", asked Reid, still caught up in statistics about groups of serial killing caregivers.

"Emma Milton. I bet she thought she was on the scent of some Death Angel, but what if…"

At this very moment, JJ called Hotchner and told him that Henry Milton had woken up from coma.


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: I do not own Criminal Minds and intend no copyright infringement.

Milton was in bad shape, but he insisted on talking to the agents, despite his doctor's warnings. "So you're taking on single homicides after all, Mr. Rossi?", he croaked, managing to smile despite his condition. Even in flimsy hospital attire with cables and tubes hanging onto every possible part of his body he looked like a financial consultant archetype: pale, little hair, short-sighted eyes, small in physique.

"It's not a single homicide anymore, Mr. Milton", Rossi explained. "Have you ever heard of these people?" He gave him the names of the surgeon, the nurse and the mortician. As he spoke, the man's face grew white with terror and his eyes seemed to bulge. The machines he was connected to broke into shrill alarm sounds. The assembled agents watched in horror as Henry Milton withered right in front of their eyes.

"Oh no…", he whispered. "Oh no… My sister… What did I do?" The doctor ushered the agents out of the room, leaving them rather mystified.

"Prentiss and me, we go back to St. Francis to find out if any suspicious deaths are connected with the doctor, the nurse or the mortician. Maybe we find someone who talked to Emma Milton after Whittaker had died. Rossi, Morgan, Reid, you go to Henry Milton's apartment. See if there's anything that could shed some light on this." Hotchner rushed out of Mount Zion Hospital's exit without waiting for a reply.

Henry Milton's apartment was just as tastefully furnished as his sister's – it even had a balcony with a beautiful view of the bay – but maybe because it was tidier, it felt colder. No books were lying around, everything was well-ordered. Milton seemed to be an amateur painter. Several paintings of Scottish landscapes adorned the living-room wall. They were all perfectly adjusted. Everything was spick and span, not a grain of dust marred the room's flawlessness.

"Financial consultancy seems to have paid off well for him after all", Morgan stated, slowly opening drawers and cabinets. Garcia had informed them that Milton had been through a financially very rough time a couple of years ago. He had even been forced to sell the only tie to his parents, the inherited family home. "What did he mean when he asked what he had done?"

"Let's recount the way he approached Rossi…" Reid said, more to himself than to anyone else. "You said you felt threatened, didn't you?"

"The way he came out of the shadows was alarming – too quiet, too unforeseen", Rossi replied.

"Why did he meet you this way? Why didn't he call ahead? Why didn't he wait in the light of a streetlamp?", Reid continued.

"He was hiding", Morgan concluded. "He didn't want to be seen. A man with secrets. What kind of secrets could a financial consultant have? And where's the connection to his sister?"

Rossi's cell phone rang. JJ was on the line, informing them that Milton had woken up for one short moment before falling into coma again. He had told the nurse something very strange, a combination of numbers and letters – rf7ne4, but he hadn't been able to explain it any further.

"Oh, I know what that means!", Reid shouted excitedly.

Before he got any further, Rossi's phone rang again. This time it was Hotchner, telling them that according to the statements of several nurses Emma Milton had asked questions about a dozen patients who had died in St. Francis Hospital during the last six months.

"I think Emma Milton was on the right track, drawing wrong conclusions", Rossi told Hotchner. "But it looks like we're just one step away from a major breakthrough. You should come here as fast as possible." He broke the connection and stowed the phone away. With a wave of his hand he urged Reid to go ahead.

"R" means "rook", "n" means "knight" – it's a chess notation. Let's see if there's a chessboard lying about somewhere."

Rossi and Reid searched the living-room and the bedroom with no avail. Morgan decided to have a go at the kitchen, although it didn't seem likely – who would store a chessboard in a kitchen, especially in such a well-ordered place?

"Nothing!", he yelled unsurprised after a couple of moments of fruitless search and shut the large kitchen cupboard. "Strange codes leading to secret information…", he thought, rolling his eyes, "…what is this? A Robert Ludlum novel? Next thing we know a safe house will blow up." As he passed the small cupboard under the sink, he hesitated… No, that was a very unlikely place for a chessboard… Well, just in case... He casually opened one of the wooden doors – and found himself at gunpoint.


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer: I do not own Criminal Minds and intend no copyright infringement.

Meanwhile in the living-room, Reid was having one of his light bulb moments. "Oh, no, of course…", Morgan heard the young doctor say while still staring down the barrel of the gun. "I don't think we're looking for a chessboard after all. Look at these paintings. This here on the right shows Eilean Donan Castle with its prominent tower – in many chess sets, the rook resembles a tower. The man on horseback right in front of it could be Alexander II, the castle's founder. A knight… Now, if we take the f7 and e4 as ordinate and abscissa…"

"We've got ourselves a problem here…", Morgan stated flatly as he was walked into the living-room with his hands up. Everyone froze. They all realized within seconds that the gun the man was holding was capable of firing teflon-coated ammunition.

"Continue speaking!", the skinny, rather short man who was aiming at the agent commanded, his hand shaking but the finger nevertheless on the trigger. "I want to know what you found out!"

"If he did that, it would be suicide. You would have no reason at all to keep us alive. You would kill us all", Rossi replied, trying to buy them some time. They were not far above ground. Henry Milton apparently didn't like curtains. Outside it was dark and the apartment was brightly illuminated. Maybe someone out on the street would look up, see the backs of three men holding up their hands and call 911. The agent really hoped some nosy neighbor was on duty tonight.

As it turned out, nosy neighbors were not around, but luckily two FBI agents who had been trained well…

Rossi's words resounding in his ear, the man's facial expression changed in a split second from determined to puzzled and back. This interplay of emotions was hardly perceptible, but Rossi noticed it with great interest: "He is not… But how did he get…?", he wondered silently.

"I need to know what you found out!", the man yelled. "Need", not "want". The alteration in his choice of words made the senior agent think.

Reid decided to dive into a complicated explanation: "If you take the numbers 7 and 4 as ordinate and abscissa – both words, by the way, were already used by the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes whose Latin name was Cartesius, that's why today the rectangular coordinate system which is defined through two axes is also often called the Cartesian coordinate system…" He droned on like this for another two or three minutes, carefully avoiding the information the man was waiting for.

Practically drowning in this torrent of words, the attacker finally lost his patience. Waving his gun he tried to interrupt Reid and make him come to the point: "Tell me… tell me what…", he stammered, his voice shaking and small.

Hotchner and Prentiss, who had been listening in from the balcony, took his hesitancy as a sign that he was losing focus and decided to kick in the balcony's door, weapons drawn. Glass broke, the agents shouted, Morgan unsuccessfully tried to wrestle the gun away from the man. Things like that sometimes happened: The agent was a close combat specialist but once every blue moon opponents were lucky and made just the right move in just the right second.


	6. Chapter 6

Disclaimer: I do not own Criminal Minds and intend no copyright infringement.

"Don't shoot! Don't shoot!", Rossi yelled in the middle of this tumult. Arms spread wide, he stepped between the agents and the attacker as soon as he knew that Morgan's attempt to gain control was in vain. "You're not the killer, right? You didn't kill and wound so many people with this gun, did you? Your voice is wavering, your hands are shaking… You're not the same person that aimed at me cold-bloodedly while I was refueling my car."

"I'm just an accountant", the man whimpered, nevertheless holding tight to the weapon. " I never meant to do any harm. Henry had hired me to work for this man – at least I think it's a man. I never saw him, never heard his name. Henry called him "man in the back". He only contacted me via e-mail. I swear I didn't know what he was doing! I mean – okay – I knew there was something fishy going on with me not knowing my bosses' name, but murder?"

"But eventually you found out, didn't you?", Rossi inquired calmly.

"Only recently! Oh, I can't go to prison for this, I just can't. I didn't know what he was doing!", he insisted.

"You discovered that you were working for someone who somehow made a profit of killing St. Francis' patients", Reid chipped in.

The accountant nodded vigorously. "The man in the back sold organs. Through the surgeon he had all the necessary data and when a customer showed up he chose a fitting patient which the nurse killed. The mortician offered the relatives a low-cost cremation and thus all evidence vanished into thin air. Henry organized the money laundering."

"Why are you here?", the young doctor asked.

"I know Henry since college. He always makes backups. I'm sure he somehow documented everything he was doing for the man in the back. When I learned that the surgeon and all the others were dead and Henry injured… The backups must be hidden around here somewhere. I just wanted to delete my name…"

At this very moment, Hotchner's cell phone rang. The attacker was so nervous, he literally jumped at the unexpected sound out of nowhere. This time Morgan didn't miss his chance. He overwhelmed the man in a second.


	7. Chapter 7

Disclaimer: I do not own Criminal Minds and intend no copyright infringement.

Morgan was so fast, Hotchner even managed to answer the phone. JJ informed him that Henry Milton had just died. "A few seconds before, he woke up once more", she said. "His last words were: I can't live with this guilt."

Rossi nodded. "He couldn't live with the guilt of having unintentionally killed his sister", he said. He kneeled down beside their former attacker who was now firmly pinned to the ground by Morgan. "Who are you? And where did you get that gun?", he asked him.

"My name is Thomas Brannon. A couple of weeks ago Henry's sister told me that she couldn't stop thinking about an acquaintances' sudden death. Oddly, I knew the name. Francine Whittaker. It had shown up in one of the files I had worked on for the man in the back. I didn't tell Emma or Henry, but her story got me thinking. After Emma died I started nosing around. Gradually I discovered the truth. Unfortunately too late for everyone."

"Who killed Emma and all the other people?", Hotchner demanded to know.

"Most likely the man who broke into my home a couple of hours ago, tripped over my dog and fell down the stairs so unluckily that he broke his neck. I think he's a professional killer, hired by the man in the back. I took the killer's gun, but I honestly didn't want to kill anyone. I only came here to cover my tracks, I didn't even know you were here."

"The killer who took out five people with a single gunshot each tripped over your dog and broke his neck while falling down your stairs? Your luck is amazing." Unbelieving, Morgan shook his head.

"Depends on the point of view", Brannon, still pinned on the carpet with the agent on top of him, groaned.

"This "man in the back" probably got nervous when Emma started inquiring about the dead patients, so he hired someone to kill her. Maybe he thought all his problems were solved with her death. Then he found out that his financial consultant had contacted you…" Reid nodded in Rossi's direction "… knowing that he would have the FBI on his trail, he decided to make a clean sweep and ordered the killer to take out all his partners: Henry Milton, the surgeon, the nurse, the mortician, you, our dumb lucky accountant here…"

"Unknowingly Emma Milton was not on a serial killer's trace, but on her own brother's scent. His involvement with illegal organ transplants got her killed. So he was right: Her death is his fault", Rossi continued.

"But will we be able to detect the "man in the back's" name?", Prentiss wondered.

"Maybe…", Reid said and turned to the painting of Eilean Donan Castle, "…if Henry Milton made his backups as meticulously as he kept his apartment clean." And then he finally got to explain what he had wanted to say all evening: "If you take the f7 and e4 as ordinate and abscissa, they mark a certain point on the canvass. Look here…" he pointed at a tiny spot right under the horse's left hoof. "The paint was applied thicker here. I guess we'll find a microfilm or something like that under it."

And so it was. Henry Milton had hidden a complete list of everyone ever involved in the illegal organ trade – perpetrators, customers, victims, under the paint of the picture. The "man in the back" was identified easily.

"This way Milton at least helped to catch the man who ordered his sister's assassination", Rossi stated some weeks later in Quantico, as he skipped through the case's notes one last time.

"Does it make him less responsible?", Reid asked.

"No", Rossi said flatly and closed the file.


End file.
